The United States is the greatest society ever on earth. Nowhere else
has there ever been achievement on the scale that has occurred here.
It was Americans who invented the electrical circuit, the semiconductor,
Blues, Jazz, and Rock and Roll music, countless medicines and cures
for diseases, and who eventually sent men to the moon. Although Americans
didn't invent the automobile, an American invented the method by which
they could be made cheaply enough for almost anyone to have one. There
are countless other examples of achievements by Americans, which all
help to give the United States the greatest standard of living the world
has ever known.

Yet despite all this, there is a strange situation existing in the
world today that warrants some explanation. While cities in other developed
countries seem to be charming, vibrant, lively, exciting and convenient
places in which to live and work, many American cities seem sterile,
worn, deteriorated, and inefficient. For example, Travel and Leisure
magazine took a poll of its readers as to their favorite city; Sydney,
Australia topped the list. London, Paris and Rome have long been known
as hot spots for romantic getaways. The Ginza in Tokyo is probably the
world's single most vibrant commercial spot, bar none. Toronto, a medium-sized
city as world cities go, is more cosmopolitan than many far larger American
cities. From what most people tell me, the most beautiful urban environment
in North America isn't in the United States; it's Vancouver, British
Columbia. In contrast, Los Angeles, though it is home to many of the
world's most productive people, has been described more times than I
can remember as a cumbersome place that people love to hate, a place
where one "wakes up in the morning, puts on his car, and goes".
(The same could be said for many other American cities, i.e., Phoenix,
Dallas, Houston, Detroit, Atlanta, Tampa, Kansas City, Orlando, and
Minneapolis, just to name a few.) In fact, in all of my dealings with
people throughout the world, I found a disdain and disgust for American
cities even though also I almost always found at least general awe --
if not approval -- of Americans and America in general (San Francisco
was an exception, and some people liked Manhattan in New York City).

Based on my own observations I tend to agree. Cities in Canada and
western Europe -- at least all the ones that I've seen -- are charming
and convenient. Downtown areas are densely developed and are lively
much of the time, with a good mix of stores, offices, and residences.
The outlying neighborhoods tend to be compact, close to downtown in
all but the biggest cities, and are well-taken care of, with a good
mix of housing types. Mass transportation is good, allowing easy access
to downtown and to other parts of town; in many cases one does not even
need to use a car at all to get to most places. In short, life in such
places, though nowhere near as satisfying overall as it is in the United
States, is strangely better in at least this one aspect.

In contrast, American cities seem awkward. Downtown areas are sterile
and lifeless, particularly after dark, in all but a few of the largest
cities (i.e., New York, Chicago, San Francisco, D.C., etc.). They also
tend to be unattractive places pockmarked by vacant lots and surrounded
by vast parking areas. There are few stores and even fewer residences.
The outlying neighborhoods closest to the downtown tend to be desolate
and dangerous ghettos full of poor people, particularly poor blacks.
Outlying neighborhoods further from the downtown often consist overwhelmingly
of single-family homes, and commercial developments built at very low
densities. Everything is far apart and mass transit service is meager
to nonexistent; what little mass transit there is tends to be concentrated
in inner cities and is used for the most part by only very poor people
(New York is again an exception, as are some of the larger east coast
cities). A car is necessary in most cases to get around, leaving anyone
who cannot drive at a serious disadvantage.

This all seems to be the opposite of how things should appear. After
all, it is the United States, rather than Canada or Europe, which overall
has the higher standard of living, and it is the United States where
on balance most people would rather live if they could. So what accounts
for the incongruity?

Modern intellectuals are quick to attribute the disfigurement of American
cities to the greater degree of egoism and capitalism found in American
society. For example, they claim that it is individualistic to want
to live in single-family homes and drive private automobiles (hence
the bromide about Americans' "love affair" with the private
automobile). They also allege that capitalism causes Americans to shun
poor people and racial minorities and live far from them in distant
suburbs. Improvement of American cities, they claim, does not require
more political freedom, but rather less-in the form of strict land use
regulations, to curb what they call the "excesses of runaway capitalism".

Up until now the modern intellectuals have essentially gone unanswered
on this issue. In truth, however, the problems of American urban areas
are not the result of individualism or of "runaway capitalism"
or any other kind of capitalism. They are actually the result of statism
-- a unique kind of statism the particulars of which were never replicated
in other developed countries, but statism nonetheless. All of the negative
attributes previously cited -- the sterile downtowns, desolate ghettos,
spread-out suburbs, poor mass transit, racial segregation, and automobile
dependence -- are not the result of capitalism and the free market,
but rather of their opposite: they are products of arbitrary government
interference in the economy, American- style.

There are four government programs that have caused much of the disfigurement
of American cities. These four are: Public Housing -- Federal Housing
Administration -- Urban Renewal -- Interstate Highway System.

The earliest of these programs, the Federal Public Housing Program,
was a major cause of the desolate ghettos surrounding the downtown areas
of many American cities. Public Housing was created as part of the New
Deal legislation of the 1930's, on the premise that poor people could
only afford housing that was so unprofitable that nobody would build
it (or at least not in a habitable fashion) without the government actually
stepping in and doing so. Another excuse used to justify public housing,
which influenced the barracks-like designs of public housing projects,
was that the kind of housing the private sector would build would be
crowded, unhealthful tenements which lacked light, air and open space.
Under the public housing program, local governments would receive federal
handouts to build, and then own and manage, housing for extremely poor
people.

Construction of public housing projects in the United States occurred
for the most part between the New Deal and 1970. Typically, a project
was a neighborhood-sized development consisting of a large number of
barracks-like apartment units, sometimes numbering in the thousands,
in buildings which were usually two or three stories high and surrounded
by parklike open spaces. In very large cities such as New York and Chicago,
mid- and high-rises were built as well. The projects were most often
constructed on the sites of former slums ringing downtown areas, and
sometimes further away from the downtowns in working-class neighborhoods.
The apartments were available, at least de facto, only to very poor
people, since they were the only ones who qualified for a government
rent subsidy; because the costs of constructing public housing projects
were much higher than for privately-built dwellings, it made no sense
fiscally for anyone to live there except with a rent subsidy.

What happened to many American public housing projects was that over
time they became, unlike the slums they replaced, ghettos that never
improved. This is because, unlike in the slums they replaced, only poor
people lived in the projects. A normal process in cities everywhere
in free countries in the world is for neighborhoods to deteriorate and
revive in a dynamic fashion, as people's values change. For instance,
South Beach in Miami is an example of a formerly deteriorated neighborhood
that has revived recently. One reason why such neighborhoods revive
is because, while they may be predominantly poor, they are by no means
monolithically so; rather, they tend to have some wealthy residents
who, for whatever reason, chose to locate there. For example, wealthy
children of poor parents who grew up in the area may be able to afford
to live elsewhere but choose not to, so as to be close to their families
and friends; they instead set up their businesses -- and sometimes their
residences -- in the ghetto. Or, a deteriorated area may have some other
attribute, for example a beach, a park, or unique architecture, cultural
facilities, etc., which makes it appealing to new, more affluent residents
who move in and revive the area economically. Neighborhoods such as
Greenwich Village in New York City and Society Hill in Philadelphia
are examples of this process, known as 'gentrification'. But regardless
of the reasons of how they ended up there, these affluent ghetto residents
are the ones who very often improve the neighborhood overall, with the
economic resources at their disposal -- i.e., the jobs they provide,
and the capital they invest. If there are enough such residents, the
neighborhood slowly improves.

But this process didn't occur in neighborhoods where large public housing
projects were built. The policies under which the projects were created
had the effect of straining out the more productive members of the neighborhood,
much like water and pasta in a spaghetti strainer. The result was that,
unlike the ghettos that preceded them, the projects lacked the productive
people who gave the neighborhood the means to improve. Without the affluence
generated by these residents, the projects began to stagnate, eventually
blighting the neighborhoods around them and causing even more widespread
deterioration. Meanwhile, to escape this deterioration the productive
people who remained in the adjoining neighborhoods moved further and
further from them, increasingly isolating the poor from the economic
activity necessary for them to escape poverty.

The wide-open design of public housing projects itself caused them
to deteriorate further. In the slum neighborhoods prior to the projects,
buildings crowded over narrow streets that, while they were dank and
dreary, were also safe-because the residents, from their houses and
tenements, could look out and see whether strangers were coming, whom
they did not know and who might cause trouble. They could then call
each other or the local police to speak to the newcomer and find out
his purpose. But given the design of the projects, with buildings standing
out in the middle of large no-man's lands of impossible-to-patrol open
space, such surveillance was impossible. As the projects became more
and more destitute over time, the open spaces in them were dominated
by drug dealers, prostitutes, and street gangs from outside the neighborhood
who preyed on the despair of the local residents. The governmental housing
authorities who managed the projects, inept at addressing the ideological
issues involved and always strapped for cash, were either unable or
unwilling (probably both) to stop the trend.

Some public housing projects became so squalid that local governments
openly acknowledged the program's failure by physically tearing them
down. This is exactly what the St. Louis Housing Authority did with
that city's infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project in the 1970s.

Like public housing, the Federal Housing Administration (or FHA) has
its roots in the New Deal. Simply put, the FHA was a series of programs
under which the federal government essentially subsidized single family
home ownership by insuring long-term mortgages for homebuyers who qualified
for such insurance under its criteria. As such it was an important cause
of the spread of single-family homes one sees surrounding American cities
today. In addition, the criteria used by the FHA were a major cause
of the racial segregation in American cities. he arbitrary premise used
to justify the FHA was that social stability depended on as large a
part of the population owning their homes as possible, and that such
high degrees of land ownership could not be achieved via the free market;
only the government, through intervention in the economy, could make
it possible.

The FHA worked as follows: a homebuyer would apply to the government
for FHA insurance on a long-term (often 30 years), self-amortizing mortgage
to be issued by a bank. The government would then determine whether
or not it would insure the mortgage based on its criteria. If the government
then chose to insure the mortgage, the bank would then issue the mortgage
to the buyer if the bank was satisfied with the buyer's credit. If the
purchaser then later defaulted, the federal government would make the
mortgage payments to the bank and would work out a repayment schedule
with the buyer. The advantage to such a long-term mortgage for middle-income
people was (and basically still is) that, unlike with shorter-term mortgages,
the monthly payments and downpayments were low enough so that middle
income people could afford to make them.

Supporters of the FHA like to point out that, if it weren't for the
federal government's mortgage insurance, there wouldn't be the long-term,
self-amortizing mortgages that we have today. And it is true that, before
the FHA, long-term mortgages were viewed by lenders as risky, so few
were made. This made it difficult for anyone but the very wealthy to
purchase land. Yet this is all really just a side issue, since there
was probably nothing preventing private lenders other than inertia from
discovering the profitability of long-term mortgages for themselves
and then taking the lead without any government involvement at all.
Today, lenders make long-term, self amortizing mortgages all the time,
with or without FHA insurance.

In any event, the evil effects of the FHA on American cities didn't
result so much from the mortgage insurance as they did from the arbitrary
criteria the government used to determine whether or not to insure a
mortgage. These criteria included a large number of irrelevant factors,
including the style of the residence, with single-family detached homes
being vastly preferred, and few homes of other styles being insured.
This caused residents of many older, denser cities, such as New York,
to lose out on mortgage insurance, since such cities had few single-family
homes or land on which they could be built. The criteria also included
whether the neighborhood had zoning or not. The FHA was a major vehicle
for the promotion of zoning ordinances; rarely could purchasers get
a long-term mortgage insured by the government in an area without such
an ordinance.

But perhaps the most vicious criteria were those involving race. In short,
black people were viewed by federal bureaucrats as a destabilizing force
in a neighborhood and, though they were never denied mortgage insurance
de jure, they were denied it de facto. This was because any neighborhood
which had black residents was 'redlined' for mortgage insurance on properties
located within that neighborhood (the term 'redlining' coming from mortgage
insurers' and lenders' practices of drawing red lines around areas on
maps within which the federal government wouldn't insure mortgages).
The stigma of being redlined was immense: once a neighborhood was redlined,
private lenders automatically thought that the neighborhood was declining
and often refused to make any loans there, government insured or not.
So while a black person could technically apply for mortgage insurance
and move into a new, all-white area where the federal government was
insuring mortgages, that black person's mortgage would likely be the
last mortgage insured in that area, since the area would subsequently
be redlined. This practice of the federal government caused white residents
to put racially restrictive covenants into the deeds for their properties
to keep their neighborhoods from being redlined, until such covenants
were ruled unenforceable as against public policy by the U.S. Supreme
Court in a ghastly decision in 1948.

It is interesting to see how Public Housing and the FHA worked in tandem
to create the emographics of most modern American cities. While one
program warehoused the poor and blacks in the city, the other gave the
wealthy and middle-income whites a subsidized ticket out. The effect
is what one sees all over the place today: poor, heavily black, and
economically stagnant inner cities, and spread-out, affluent suburbs
that are almost completely white and comprised of single-family dwellings.

The third of these programs, Urban Renewal, was a federal program started
in 1949 with the goal of clearing large slum areas in and around the
downtown areas of American towns and cities through the government's
coercive use of eminent domain and replacing the slums with new commercial
development. The arbitrary premise behind Urban Renewal was that, if
left alone, developers in the free market would not rebuild or renovate
slum properties, without the government helping them to do so by first
condemning the properties. The program was to allegedly work as follows:
a real estate developer would propose to redevelop a run-down area,
and the local government would then condemn the land with its power
of eminent domain, destroy the buildings on it, and sell it to the developer.
The developer was then supposed to redevelop the land with new, upscale
commercial development.

In actual fact the program usually ended up working differently. Many
developers did propose new developments, in response to which governments
condemned large areas of cities. But very often the process ended there.
The existing buildings were not immediately torn down nor were new projects
constructed. Instead what happened was the condemned areas were redlined
by lenders for new investment, just as were areas in which minorities
lived under the FHA. In addition, because of the prospect of their buildings
being demolished by the local government at any time, property owners
in the condemned areas wouldn't maintain their buildings. Over time,
urban renewal areas became slums even more fetid than they were before
condemnation. Eventually many such areas became bulldozed anyway, not
to make way for shimmering new emerald cities, but simply because they
became nuisances. As for the new projects, many never materialized,
usually because there was no demand for them (or the developers' initial
proposals were shams to begin with).

Urban Renewal disfigured cities because of the introduction of eminent
domain into the land development process. Normally, developers demolish
buildings only after the developers have acquired the properties on
which these buildings are located, and only after they know demand exists
for more profitable developments in their place; thus, there are normally
few properties in economically healthy cities which end up vacant as
a result of market forces, and those that do normally don't stay so
for long. But with eminent domain, governments suddenly became able
to arbitrarily condemn far more land than was ever demanded for new
development, whether demand existed for such development or not. With
this ability, it became possible for a government to literally tear
down an entire city.

The lasting effect of urban renewal is the large number of vacant lots
that one sees in the downtowns of almost all except the largest or fastest-
growing American cities; many have since been turned into parking lots
for interstate highway commuters. These large amounts of vacant land
are not only eyesores; like the open spaces in public housing projects,
they are no-man's lands that are hard to patrol, and become hangouts
for the undesirables who cause many downtowns to develop reputations
for being dangerous.

Proponents of urban renewal attempt to justify the program on the grounds
that a few urban renewal projects did actually materialize as proposed,
with the construction of new, upscale developments on the sites of former
slums. Examples include Constitution Plaza in Hartford, Government Center
in Boston, and Embarcadero Center in San Francisco. However, these projects
were all built in office markets that were so active at the time these
projects were constructed that they would've been built anyway, with
or without Urban Renewal.

Perhaps the most disfiguring of the four programs ultimately was the
Interstate Highway System. The interstates are a national network of
limited access highways extending between, and then through, all major
American cities. Many of them are the freeways we all know and love
so well, labeled with numbers and an "I" before them, such
as I-95 or I-75. The program was created in 1956, with most of the actual
construction occurring between 1960 and 1980. The stated reason behind
the interstate system was that, given the cold war hostilities between
the superpowers at the time, a large network of limited access highways
which sliced through cities was necessary to evacuate them in the event
of a nuclear attack (!)12 and that, consequently, construction of such
a highway system was a vital government function to save the future
of the country. In truth the reason for the system was very different.

The interstate highways were essentially the result of extensive lobbying
by the American Road Builder's Association (ARBA). It's easy to see
why ARBA was eager for such a road network, given the industries whose
employees were its constituents: the asphalt and concrete industries,
whose products would actually be used to construct the highways; the
automobile industry, whose products would be used on the highways; the
coal, steel, glass, and rubber industries, whose products would be used
to make automobiles; and the trucking industry, whose industry would
become much more useful due to the highways. In fact, ARBA was the second
largest lobby in the United States at the time, after the petroleum
industry (which was also in favor of the interstate system, for obvious
reasons).

To understand the magnitude of ARBA in terms of votes, think of the
populations of the states of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana,
and Michigan, whose labor forces worked overwhelmingly in these industries;
then, throw in significant numbers from Alabama, Kentucky, California,
Illinois, New Jersey and New York. That's a lot of voters who believed
their interests were furthered through an alliance with ARBA. In short,
the interstates were never the result of some individualistic, egoistic
'love of the private automobile', but rather of mixed-economy politics
straight-up: the initiation of physical force for the sake of the greatest
good for the greatest pressure group.

The interstates were designed as a grid, extending between and connecting
all of the major cities. Around and within cities they were designed
as wheel- and-spoke arrangements of radial highways which met in the
downtown area and beltways encircling the city a considerable distance
out from the downtown. Even numbered highways were to run east-west,
with higher numbers further north. Odd-numbered highways were to run
north-south, with higher numbers further east. Hence, I-5 runs the length
of the west coast, while I-95 runs the length of the east coast; I-4,
I-8, and I-10 run across the south, while I-90 and I-80 run across the
north; I-10 and I-5 intersect in Los Angeles, near the southwest corner
of the country; I-90 and I-5 intersect in Seattle, near the northwest
corner; I-90 and I-95 in Boston, in the northeast corner; and I-10 and
I-95 in Jacksonville, near the southeast corner. (For an illustration
of the designs, I invite anyone to thumb through a copy of Rand McNally's
North American Road Atlas, and compare the amount of expressways in
American cities with those in Canadian and Mexican cities.)

The effects of interstate highways on American cities are as profound
as they are numerous, so all I can hope to do here is give a brief summary.
First, they gave the white middle class in the market for new homes
a subsidized means to get away from the redlined ghettos of the inner
cities and beyond the reach of mass transit, and out into the rural
hinterlands where land was available for the FHA to insure mortgages
on new single-family homes. But they also did much more. The highways
hastened the decline of the inner cities not only because of this escape
valve but also because of the physical nature of the highways themselves,
given the way they sliced through neighborhoods, turning them into dusty,
congested no-man's lands during their construction. The threat of condemnation
for an interstate highway by governments in inner cities also had the
effect of making investing in inner city properties risky, so investment
there dried up for that reason as well, in addition to the redlining
resulting from the FHA and the deterioration due to public housing and
urban renewal.

Furthermore, since most of the suburbs to which the middle class moved
were beyond the reach of mass transit, the radial design of the interstate
highways in effect eventually became the mass transit system for the
new suburbanites, much the way trains and buses were in the inner cities.
Soon it became more convenient for suburbanites to simply use their
cars wherever they went, regardless of whether they went somewhere served
by traditional mass transit or not. Most suburbanites stopped their
use of mass transit altogether, leaving it to the poor, elderly, minorities,
and others who were trapped in the inner city. Because most of the suburbs
did not have mass transit, and thanks to the FHA were laid out in a
low-density spread of single family homes, distances between stores,
workplaces and homes there became so great that one couldn't live there
very effectively without having a car. Thus, suburbanites became automobile
dependent to an unprecedented level. When they all took their cars to
work downtown via the spokes of the interstate network, they caused
traffic nightmares on inner-city streets that were never designed to
handle the incredible number of cars. When they wanted to park their
cars downtown, they found vacant lots everywhere, thanks to urban renewal's
most lasting, most visible, and most ironic legacy: provision of parking
lots for interstate freeway commuters.

While these programs differed in their specifics, they all started
with the same statist premise: that the free market is inferior to government
intervention, which ultimately is derived from the poisonous notion
that man should live according to the arbitrary, rather than according
to reality. Consequently they were all miserable failures, drastically
disfiguring the United States.

The free market is inferior to nothing. It cannot be inferior to anything.
It is the only moral arrangement for urban development, as it is for
all commerce, because it is the only possible consequence of the only
moral political system: laissez-faire capitalism, where people are free
to pursue the values of their choice so long as they do not violate
the rights of others; in this system the government is not a builder
or producer of any other values, but rather is only a protector of the
rights of those who do produce and partake in the system. In such a
system, people must live by reason and egoism, choosing their values
by their own thought and then figuring out how to achieve these values.
They do not live by blind obedience to the arbitrary whims of a Kantian
authority figure dictating from above.

In the context of land development, laissez-faire capitalism means
that developers produce buildings so as to sell or lease out the space
they contain. It means that they are free to produce buildings that
will maximize the amount of such space, so that they can maximize their
returns. This means a tendency towards high density development in sought-after
locations, such as downtown areas. When an area is so densely developed
that congestion hinders access to the area, developers start building
up less-developed areas on the periphery. Meanwhile, other developers
come in and build mass transit systems in the overcongested areas, to
improve access so they can further squeeze even more marketable space
into these areas. What ultimately results is a vibrant, exciting, inspiring
environment in which to live. This -- and not the low- slung, low-density
desolation of most American cities -- is how cities can and ought to
develop. And all of the greatest cities in developed countries, such
as London, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Rome, Toronto, as well as the large
American cities which developed before the four programs such as New
York, Chicago, and San Francisco, developed in this fashion (though
the newer suburbs of these American cities definitely did not).

I don't intend in this article to impugn the single-family residence
or the private automobile. These are both very worthy values. A single
family home gives one space and privacy that multifamily condominiums
and townhouses rarely offer; this is useful for certain living arrangements,
such as large families. And private automobiles are extremely convenient
in many situations because they give people an unprecedented freedom
of mobility for any purpose whatsoever. Both of these are highly desirable
and certainly should be sought after.

But just because private automobiles and single-family homes are desirable
does not mean that one's desire for them implies an obligation on the
part of someone else to provide them. This is true for all values. To
paraphrase Ayn Rand: just because one has freedom of speech does not
mean he has a right to a podium from which to speak. Just because, for
example, one owns a car does not mean that he has a right to a space
in which to park it, or an interstate highway or any other road on which
to drive it. Space for roads and parking facilities is a money-loser
for developers because it ultimately means less space that can be constructed
for uses which are much higher revenue generators, such as retail or
offices; developers therefore shy away from building them. Consequently,
densely-developed areas of cities are by their very nature not friendly
for private automobiles. The solution to this problem is not to disfigure
cities by burrowing interstate highways and shoehorning parking lots
into them, or forcing developers to ultimately do the same. Rather the
solution is to realize that by its nature the private car, as good as
it is in some contexts, has its limitations, with its lack of usefulness
in central cities being one of them. In sum, to find the answers one
must not seek the arbitrary; one must understand reality.

Interestingly, in the last two decades American cities have been making
great strides towards becoming more like cities in other developed countries
in terms of being pleasant, vibrant places. Baltimore's Inner Harbor
development and Miami's Bayside Marketplace have made headlines, as
have the gentrified neighborhoods of inner cities nationwide. Cities
have built clean, new mass transit systems out into suburbs (though
they should be built privately). Economic prosperity has meant new skyscrapers
on the sites of vacant urban-renewal parking lots downtown, while new
shopping centers and office developments have given once-sterile suburbs
a more urban flavor. And revitalization of older buildings and neighborhoods
is occurring everywhere. Intellectuals are all too eager, in support
of statism, to attribute American cities' comeback stories to some government
intervention or another.

When some skyscraper or well-designed commercial development is built
on an urban-renewal lot or in a former slum, for example, they are quick
to credit not the developer who conceived the idea but rather the local
government for having the foresight to permit it; they then prattle
on about how great the government and private sector work together,
and consequently how government and business should form partnerships
to renovate our cities.

But this babble is nothing but a bunch of cowardly face-saving. The
real reason for the comeback has not been anything affirmative in terms
of government action or 'partnership' with business, as much as it has
been something negative: all four of the above programs are all but
dead de facto. Just under a decade ago, President Bush declared the
Interstate System complete; very few interstates are being built anywhere
today. Virtually no new public housing projects are being built either,
and those that do exist are slowly being sold by governments to private
non-profits who do not have the patience to put up with the riff-raff
that government housing authorities tolerated. As for the FHA, the government
no longer has the lock on long-term, self-amortizing mortgages. Today,
private lenders, convinced of the profitability of such loans, make
them on any type of dwellings, not just single-family homes, and without
the arbitrary criteria formerly used by the federal government. Consequently,
redlining is no longer the problem it once was. And urban renewal turned
out to be so unpopular it spawned a backlash movement: historic preservation,
in which governments, instead of initiating physical force against property
owners to tear their buildings down, now initiate it against them to
keep their buildings standing-even when there's no demand for them to
do so, and there is demand for new development on the sites of such
buildings.

Sadly, there are few places today where one can get the real story
regarding the true causes of American urban decline during the twentieth
century without doing a fair amount of research. Instead, what we get
from the media and the universities is that the excesses of capitalism
produced the decline, and the arbitrary influence of government, through
extensive regulation, planning, and control of the land development
industry, is slowly 'bringing the excesses into line'. But whenever
you hear this kind of gibberish, just remember that it was the government
who made the mess to begin with -- and don't let anyone ever say that
American cities are evidence that socialism is superior to capitalism.